黑水

文/蠡湖野人（野评人）这部影片叫《黑水》。

标题为什么说你家锅有毒？

因为里面有一种材料叫特氟龙。

一、什么是特氟龙首先我们来了解一下本片的大佬——特氟龙，是个啥东西。

特氟龙是一个商标，英文叫Teflon®，是美国杜邦公司注册的。

它的化学名叫聚四氟乙烯（Polytetrafluoroethylene），英文缩写为PTFE，俗称“塑料王，哈拉”。

用它做成的材料，300℃才能分解，400℃才能水解，抗酸抗碱抗各种溶剂，连王水都溶解不了，再加上耐高温、摩擦系数低，广泛应用于原子能、国防、航天、电子、电气、化工、机械、仪器、仪表、建筑等领域。

民用领域也和我们的生活朝夕相伴，最常见的如不粘锅、雨衣雨具和衣服等。

二、特氟龙和杜邦公司杜邦是一家1802年诞生于美国的化学制品和销售公司，经营内容涉及食品、保健、家具、交通、服装等领域。

2018年总收入279.4亿美元，员工52000人，在世界五百强中排名171。

我在网上查证了资料，有和影片对得上的也有对不上的，对不上的部分我以影片为准。

接下来我以杜邦公司为主角，撸一下它与特氟龙的前世今生。

三、我对影片的看法首先，影片的话题意义超过艺术价值，这是毋庸置疑的。

电影对社会和法制的推动，韩国的《熔炉》是杰出代表，它直接推动政府出台了未成年人保护法，美国电影人也喜欢把一起起事件搬上银幕，让观众了解事件的始末，这无疑会加强民众对政府和公司的警惕性和监控，而且美国是个案例法的国家，作用就更大了。

《黑水》同个班底拍摄制作的另一部同类题材影片《聚焦》，获得了2016年奥斯卡最佳电影，推荐一看。

反过来看我们这里，现实题材的影片就少了点，我十分期待有人把华为251事件搬上银幕。

《我不是药神》开了个好头，但到目前为止还没有后续的作品接上。

值得一提的是，《我不是药神》》是现实题材改编，而且改得非常多。

真正好的现实题材电影是需要制作者从骨子里坚持现实主义的，我们这里可能有现实题材，但目前来看还缺乏现实主义。

其次，如上所述，影片的表现手法比较普通，一般观众容易觉得无聊，即使对于喜欢这类题材的观众，最后半小时也很差强人意，因为没有做到情绪上的连贯性。

如果说前面一个半小时通过一系列细节让人的情绪保持在一条水平线上（和《聚焦》相比确实很平），那最后半小时就往下滑了，直到最后也没有拉一个高潮起来。

导演和编剧也知道这一点，所以安排了比洛特夫妻吵架、晕倒送医的戏份，但故事进展到这样的环节，观众已经无法被主线之外的情节吸引。

第三，部分情节缺乏说服力，如一开始比洛特律师接下养殖场的案子，影片交代的动机是乡情，并且使用《乡村小路带我回家》来渲染情绪，固然感人，但理智上缺乏说服力。

又比如最后半部分，角色们全部处于等待状态，而等待的结果是杜邦公司反悔，作为一名资深律师，难道一开始没想到这一点？

影片中比洛特把责任都推给了政府和杜邦公司，这都是情绪上的宣泄。

如果影片在前面作出一些技术性的交代如杜邦公司的律师找出了法律漏洞留作后路，那杜邦公司的突然反悔就有说服力很多。

当然，影片还是非常值得一看的，尤其是对于关注社会新闻的朋友更是不可错过。

对于我来说，看完这部片子之后，多认识了一种叫特氟龙的人工合成材料，而且它就在我们身边（欧美国家已经禁止使用，我国国家质检总局2019年才开始开始论证特氟龙是否危害人体健康，目前仅靠厂商自觉）。

以后买锅碗瓢盆塑料制品这些东西查看组成材料的时候，就会特别注意聚四氟乙烯、PFOA、PFOS、C-8这些字眼了。

添加微信号paokaishubenxbb加入全国影迷群经作者授权发布，转载请注明作者和出处

临近2020颁奖季，热门爆款影片看不停：火了大半年金棕榈得主《寄生虫》、叫好又叫座的《小丑》、马丁·斯科塞斯九年磨一剑的《爱尔兰人》、细腻温柔的黑马选手《婚姻故事》……这其中，还有一部星光熠熠的佳作不该被忽略。

《卡罗尔》导演托德·海因斯执导，马克·鲁弗洛、安妮·海瑟薇、蒂姆·罗宾斯强强联手。

《卡罗尔》(2015)曾出品《聚焦》《华盛顿邮报》《绿皮书》等佳作的公司Participant，再度触及社会题材。

由真实事件改编，这部电影，或许与你我息息相关——

黑水 (2019)8.62019 / 美国 / 剧情 / 托德·海因斯 / 马克·鲁法洛 安妮·海瑟薇主角名叫Rob Bilott，本片的故事就是讲述他一个人单枪匹马对阵美国最大的化学工业公司——杜邦集团（Dupont, 1802-2017，于2017年8月与Dow Chemical Company合并成为了DowDupont)。

没错，就是电影《狐狸猎手》里史蒂夫·卡瑞尔饰演的继承人约翰·杜邦一枪打死了自己的摔跤教练的那个杜邦集团。

《狐狸猎手》(2014)该片改编自Nathaniel Rich于2016年发布在《纽约时报》的一篇报道《成为杜邦集团噩梦的律师》。

Dark Water，中文译名为《黑水》，或是《黑暗水域》，由《卡罗尔》的导演托德·海因斯执导，马克·鲁弗洛参与制片并出演Bilott，安妮·海瑟薇饰演女主Sarah。

上映两周，该片目前在烂番茄获得92%的好评，豆瓣8.3分，IMDb 7.6分。

Rob Bilott，一位在俄亥俄州工作的环境法律师，刚刚在律所Taft升级到了小合伙人，有一天接到了来自老家外婆/祖母（英文中统称grandma因此不确定）邻居Tennant的电话，说他的牲口都死光了，他怀疑是杜邦集团在买下了土地之后，在用化学废品污染土地。

收到电话的Bilott很为难，作为一名企业事务律师，他的专长是为大型化工企业辩护，也就是Tennant的对立面，他甚至多次和杜邦集团的律师合作过。

Bilott带着Tennant的录像带回家，通知他的妻子Sarah要回一次家去侦察一下，看自己有什么可以帮忙的。

当Bilott来到Tennant的土地，面前是一片荒芜，“这个农场简直像是一片墓地”，他这样形容。

所有的牲口都死光了，死去的牲口身体器官各种病变，惨不忍睹。

回到公司，Bilott和他的老板，公司的大合伙人Terp报告说想要接下这个案件。

Terp勉强答应了，以为只是简单的提交些文件诉讼走个基本程序，毕竟Taft的生意是辩护大集团而不是把他们告上法庭。

他没想到的是，这一次点头，揭开了杜邦集团整整半个多世纪的“黑色水域”。

在杜邦集团的文件里，Bilott发现有一个字母缩写PFOA被反复提起，却没有人知道是什么。

直到他询问了以为化学专家，才知道是一种有碳元素合成的新化学物质。

在整整半个多世纪里，杜邦一直在使用这种PFOA，后被改名为C8（由3M公司发明）的物质来生产他们的名产品不粘锅Teflon。

自从1950年，3M和杜邦就开始进行有关C8的实验。

他们发现在Teflon生产线上的女工生下的7个婴儿中有2个有先天畸形，老鼠在长期接触C8后会发生肝脏病变等。

杜邦在得知实验结果之后并没有通知任何机构，甚至把这些有毒化学物质倾倒到水域，Bilott答应去看牲口的时候以为只是一个小镇，但最后水质检测却发现在West Virginia有整整6块城镇区域C8超标，影响了超过数十万人口。

最后法院决定抽取被影响区域市民的血液样本进行分析判断C8是否和病变有直接联系。

7万市民提供了血液样本，随之而来的便是漫长的等待。

一年过去了，两年过去了，每天每天，律所的老板，起诉的市民，Bilott的家庭，他生活中的每一个人都在向他施压，Bilott甚至因为精神压力过大而昏倒进了急救室……终于在第7年，Bilott接到了医学研究的结果，C8直接导致包括肾癌，甲状腺癌等疾病。

本片虽未重现鲁弗洛2016年出演的同类型传记片《聚焦》的辉煌，但依然是一部引人深省的好电影。

全片冷静却不乏细腻的情感，虽然不是导演海因斯最熟悉的故事类型，但依然注入了一丝柔软，比如里面角色的刻画都非常细致，不仅是Bilott的挣扎，也把Terp和Sarah想为正义发声但不断被或是律所或是家庭关系所捆绑的内心矛盾。

电影中很多段对话都很让人感动：在律所投票决定要不要继续接这个案子的时候，Terp斥责那些投否决票的律师，他质问何为正义感，难道帮助他人不正是身为律师应该履行的义务吗。

当Bilott请求Terp继续支付账单并许诺这个案子结案的时候一定可以收支平衡，Terp问“你以为我接这个案子是为钱吗？

”

Sarah在医院急救室告诉Terp，Rob长大的时候搬了10次家，直到他来到了Taft，Taft对他来说远远不只是一个律所，而是他安顿下来的家庭。

Sarah说：”他愿意牺牲他的工作和家庭，只为了一个陌生人。

我不知道这是什么，但这绝不是失败。

”

当然还有在得知杜邦打算一一上诉整整3535件案件的时候，Bilott的那番话。

他挂了电话之后脸上的绝望让人唏嘘不已，他说我们都以为政府机关会保护我们，以为各种机构（例如EPA, United States Envioronmental Protection Agency) 会保护我们。

但是没有人，没有任何机构，组织，政府在保护着民众。

”只有我们自己保护自己。

”

一般一年可以庭审4个案件，算下来要审整整800年。

很多大企业都用这种耗时间的方式来逼起诉人放弃，很多人没有等到他们的案子被审就去世了。

但是Bilott花了他职业生涯过去整整20年和杜邦抗衡，他决不放弃。

于是2015年底Bilott出席法庭，3535个案件，他一个个接下。

第一个案件获赔160万美金，第二个案件获赔350万，到2017年杜邦集团赔偿总额6.71亿美金，解决了3535案件。

是啊，6.71亿美金，听起来是个天价数字，但是对于杜邦集团算什么呢。

2005年的时候杜邦由于使用C8而污染毒害居民水域被EPA罚款1650万美金，是EPA历史上最大的罚单，但是Bilott计算下来这不过Teflon一个产品三天的利润，都不是收入，而是利润，那么6.71亿的法律赔偿仅仅是一个产品120天的利润。

短短四个月的利润，对于千千万万的家庭来说是3535条鲜活的生命。

电影中还有不少细节让人心酸：Tennant家庭因为去找了律师导致整个小镇最大的雇主杜邦被起诉而遭到了整个小镇的排挤，Parkersburg更是失业率暴增，劳动部门办公室门前是失业市民排起的长龙。

当小镇在采集抽血液样本的时候，居民更是直接和Bilott说一定不会有病变，“杜邦可都是好人”。

杜邦养育了整个小镇几代人，给他们买房，供他们的子女上大学，但是代价是肺癌，胰腺癌，畸形儿。

直到出生的孩子先天畸形，直到工作数年的杜邦员工们都一个个生病倒下，才揭开了这个企业的真实面目。

Bilott实为人民英雄。

他是一名极为优秀的律师，仅仅是开车经过是看到一位小姑娘的牙齿发黑就联想到污染物质是在水里。

当杜邦用整整一个储藏室的超过11万页的文件来整他的时候，丝毫不退缩，几个月的时间每天每天的坐在储藏室标记一份又一份文件。

如今99%的世界人口身体里都含有C8，通过饮用水，不粘锅涂层等途径。

还有更多超过6万种未被审核的化学物质在被各化工企业广泛使用。

Bilott的战斗依然没有停止。

他在Tennant之后再也没有接过一个企业客户，而选择贡献他整个职业生涯来真正的保护这个世界。

也要感谢主创马克·鲁弗洛对环境的热诚，用他自己的方式把这个故事传递给全世界。

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesBy Nathaniel Rich Jan. 6, 2016Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White.White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White’s grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ‘‘It just felt like the right thing to do,’’ he says today. ‘‘I felt a connection to those folks.’’The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft’s headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm’s glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft’s founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ‘‘He didn’t show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,’’ says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott’s supervisor. ‘‘Let’s put it that way.’’Terp joined Bilott for the meeting. Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them as children. They had seven cows then. Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money.DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named after the creek that ran through it. The same creek flowed down to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows. Not long after the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. At the sight of a Tennant they would amble over, nuzzle and let themselves be milked. No longer. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged.Wilbur fed a videotape into the VCR. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. Images jumped and repeated. The sound accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror movie. In the opening shot the camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding forest, the white ash trees shedding their leaves and the rippling, shallow water, before pausing on what appears to be a snowbank at an elbow in the creek. The camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth.‘‘I’ve taken two dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,’’ Tennant says in voice-over. ‘‘The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’’The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ‘‘This is what they expect a man’s cows to drink on his own property,’’ Wilbur says. ‘‘It’s about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans.’’At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. Patches of its hair are missing, and its back is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Another blast of static is followed by a close-up of a dead black calf lying in the snow, its eye a brilliant, chemical blue. ‘‘One hundred fifty-three of these animals I’ve lost on this farm,’’ Wilbur says later in the video. ‘‘Every veterinarian that I’ve called in Parkersburg, they will not return my phone calls or they don’t want to get involved. Since they don’t want to get involved, I’ll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I’m going to start at this head.’’The video cuts to a calf’s bisected head. Close-ups follow of the calf’s blackened teeth (‘‘They say that’s due to high concentrations of fluoride in the water that they drink’’), its liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ‘‘I don’t even like the looks of them,’’ he says. ‘‘It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before.’’Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows’ eyes. ‘‘This cow’s done a lot of suffering,’’ he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.‘‘This is bad,’’ Bilott said to himself. ‘‘There’s something really bad going on here.’’Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. It was, he says again, ‘‘the right thing to do.’’ Bilott might have had the practiced look of a corporate lawyer — soft-spoken, milk-complected, conservatively attired — but the job had not come naturally to him. He did not have a typical Taft résumé. He had not attended college or law school in the Ivy League. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Germany. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a junior, he received a recruitment letter from a tiny liberal-arts school in Sarasota called the New College of Florida, which graded pass/fail and allowed students to design their own curriculums. Many of his friends there were idealistic, progressive — ideological misfits in Reagan’s America. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. ‘‘I learned to question everything you read,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t take anything at face value. Don’t care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.’’ Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis about the rise and fall of Dayton. He hoped to become a city manager.But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. ‘‘It seemed like it would have real-world impact,’’ he said. ‘‘It was something you could do to make a difference.’’ When, after graduation, Taft made him an offer, his mentors and friends from New College were aghast. They didn’t understand how he could join a corporate firm. Bilott didn’t see it that way. He hadn’t really thought about the ethics of it, to be honest. ‘‘My family said that a big firm was where you’d get the most opportunities,’’ he said. ‘‘I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could. I don’t think I had any clue of what that involved.’’At Taft, he asked to join Thomas Terp’s environmental team. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known as Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. Superfund was a lucrative development for firms like Taft, creating an entire subfield within environmental law, one that required a deep understanding of the new regulations in order to guide negotiations among municipal agencies and numerous private parties. Terp’s team at Taft was a leader in the field.As an associate, Bilott was asked to determine which companies contributed which toxins and hazardous wastes in what quantities to which sites. He took depositions from plant employees, perused public records and organized huge amounts of historical data. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. ‘‘I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you defend these claims,’’ he said. He became the consummate insider.Bilott was proud of the work he did. The main part of his job, as he understood it, was to help clients comply with the new regulations. Many of his clients, including Thiokol and Bee Chemical, disposed of hazardous waste long before the practice became so tightly regulated. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. A colleague on Taft’s environmental team, observing that he had little time for a social life, introduced him to a childhood friend named Sarah Barlage. She was a lawyer, too, at another downtown Cincinnati firm, where she defended corporations against worker’s-compensation claims. Bilott joined the two friends for lunch. Sarah doesn’t remember him speaking. ‘‘My first impression was that he was not like other guys,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m pretty chatty. He’s much quieter. We complemented each other.’’

The road to one of the Tennant farms. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesThey married in 1996. The first of their three sons was born two years later. He felt secure enough at Taft for Barlage to quit her job and raise their children full-time. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as ‘‘a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough.’’ He was a model Taft lawyer. Then Wilbur Tennant came along.The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position. The law firm was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. The prospect of taking on DuPont ‘‘did cause us pause,’’ Terp concedes. ‘‘But it was not a terribly difficult decision for us. I’m a firm believer that our work on the plaintiff’s side makes us better defense lawyers.’’Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a West Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle — one of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia — though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft.‘‘His taking on the Tennant case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’’Bilott, for his part, is reluctant to discuss his motivations for taking the case. The closest he came to elaborating was after being asked whether, having set out ‘‘to make a difference’’ in the world, he had any misgivings about the path his career had taken.‘‘There was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants,’’ he said after a pause. ‘‘It was a great opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.’’Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’ In other words, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault.This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to suffer the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburg’s main employer. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. ‘‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’’ they said, when confronted. Four different times, the Tennants changed churches.Wilbur called the office nearly every day, but Bilott had little to tell him. He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients — pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. ‘‘We were getting frustrated,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I couldn’t blame the Tennants for getting angry.’’FURTHER READINGFor more about DuPont's FPOA pollution, see ‘‘The Teflon Toxin’’ by Sharon Lerner (The Intercept, Aug. 17, 2015) and ‘‘Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia’’ by Mariah Blake (The Huffington Post, Aug. 27, 2015).With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: ‘‘PFOA.’’ In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Taft’s in-house library. The chemistry expert that he had retained for the case did, however, vaguely recall an article in a trade journal about a similar-sounding compound: PFOS, a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard.Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. But there was nothing. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them. Against DuPont’s protests, the order was granted. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Taft’s headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted by DuPont scientists. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. Bilott spent the next few months on the floor of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. He stopped answering his office phone. When people called his secretary, she explained that he was in the office but had not been able to reach the phone in time, because he was trapped on all sides by boxes.‘‘I started seeing a story,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I may have been the first one to actually go through them all. It became apparent what was going on: They had known for a long time that this stuff was bad.’’Bilott is given to understatement. (‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated,’’ his colleague Edison Hill says, ‘‘is an understatement.’’) The story that Bilott began to see, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ‘‘I was shocked,’’ he said. That was another understatement. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. The company appeared not to realize what it had handed over. ‘‘It was one of those things where you can’t believe you’re reading what you’re reading,’’ he said. ‘‘That it’s actually been put in writing. It was the kind of stuff you always heard about happening but you never thought you’d see written down.’’The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people in all.Bilott learned from the documents that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A year later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA’s peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the E.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M — which continued to serve as the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations — found that ingestion of the substance caused birth defects in rats. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of seven births, two had eye defects. DuPont did not make this information public.In 1984, DuPont became aware that dust vented from factory chimneys settled well beyond the property line and, more disturbing, that PFOA was present in the local water supply. DuPont declined to disclose this finding. In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public.(In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. during those decades. When asked for evidence, it forwarded two letters written to West Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links between PFOA exposure and human health problems.)By the ’90s, Bilott discovered, DuPont understood that PFOA caused cancerous testicular, pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA damage from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. DuPont at last hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that ‘‘for the first time, we have a viable candidate’’ that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time. Discussions were held at DuPont’s corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it. The risk was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important part of DuPont’s business, worth $1 billion in annual profit.‘His taking on the Tennant case, given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a low-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly.By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. DuPont’s scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants’ remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later — the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. Bilott had what he needed.In August 2000, Bilott called DuPont’s lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. It was a brief conversation.The Tennants settled. The firm would receive its contingency fee. The whole business might have ended right there. But Bilott was not satisfied.‘‘I was irritated,’’ he says.DuPont was nothing like the corporations he had represented at Taft in the Superfund cases. ‘‘This was a completely different scenario. DuPont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway. These were bad facts.’’ He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking water had done to cattle. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? What did the insides of their heads look like? Were their internal organs green?Bilott spent the following months drafting a public brief against DuPont. It was 972 pages long, including 136 attached exhibits. His colleagues call it ‘‘Rob’s Famous Letter.’’ ‘‘We have confirmed that the chemicals and pollutants released into the environment by DuPont at its Dry Run Landfill and other nearby DuPont-owned facilities may pose an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment,’’ Bilott wrote. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft.DuPont reacted quickly, requesting a gag order to block Bilott from providing the information he had discovered in the Tennant case to the government. A federal court denied it. Bilott sent his entire case file to the E.P.A.‘‘DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them,’’ says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who later joined Bilott’s legal team. ‘‘For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. is an extraordinary remedy. You could realize how bad that looks. They must have known that there was a small chance of winning. But they were so afraid that they were willing to roll the dice.’’With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. Though nominally representing the Tennants — their settlement had yet to be concluded — Bilott spoke for the public, claiming extensive fraud and wrongdoing. He had become a threat not merely to DuPont but also to, in the words of one internal memo, ‘‘the entire fluoropolymers industry’’ — an industry responsible for the high-performance plastics used in many modern devices, including kitchen products, computer cables, implantable medical devices and bearings and seals used in cars and airplanes. PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.

Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill.‘‘Rob’s letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater,’’ says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiff’s lawyer in West Virginia who works with Bilott. ‘‘Before that letter, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated.’’ Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.It was especially damning to see these allegations against DuPont under the letterhead of one of the nation’s most prestigious corporate defense firms. ‘‘You can imagine what some of the other companies that Taft was representing — a Dow Chemical — might have thought of a Taft lawyer taking on DuPont,’’ Larry Winter says. ‘‘There was a threat that the firm would suffer financially.’’ When I asked Thomas Terp about Taft’s reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, not quite convincingly, that he didn’t recall one. ‘‘Our partners,’’ he said, ‘‘are proud of the work that he has done.’’Bilott, however, worried that corporations doing business with Taft might see things differently. ‘‘I’m not stupid, and the people around me aren’t stupid,’’ he said. ‘‘You can’t ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think. I perceived that there were some ‘What the hell are you doing?’ responses.’’The letter led, four years later, in 2005, to DuPont’s reaching a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A., which had accused the company of concealing its knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and presence in the environment in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act. (DuPont was not required to admit liability.) At the time, it was the largest civil administrative penalty the E.P.A. had obtained in its history, a statement that sounds more impressive than it is. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year.Bilott never represented a corporate client again.The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. In all ways but one, Bilott himself was in the ideal position to file such a suit. He understood PFOA’s history as well as anyone inside DuPont did. He had the technical and regulatory expertise, as he had proved in the Tennant case. The only part that didn’t make sense was his firm: No Taft lawyer, to anyone’s recollection, had ever filed a class-action lawsuit.It was one thing to pursue a sentimental case on behalf of a few West Virginia cattle farmers and even write a public letter to the E.P.A. But an industry-threatening class-action suit against one of the world’s largest chemical corporations was different. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Taft’s bottom line. This point was made to Terp by Bernard Reilly, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, according to accounts from Bilott’s plaintiff’s-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to demand that Bilott back off the case. (Terp confirms that Reilly called him but will not disclose the content of the call; Bilott and Reilly decline to speak about it, citing continuing litigation.) Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.A lead plaintiff soon presented himself. Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ‘‘low concentrations,’’ but that it was not a health risk. Kiger had underlined statements that he found particularly baffling, like: ‘‘DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health.’’ The term ‘‘support confidence’’ seemed bizarre, as did ‘‘protective of human health,’’ not to mention the claim that DuPont’s own data supported its confidence in its own guidelines.Still, Kiger might have forgotten about it had his wife, Darlene, not already spent much of her adulthood thinking about PFOA. Darlene’s first husband had been a chemist in DuPont’s PFOA lab. (Darlene asked that he not be named so that he wouldn’t be involved in the local politics around the case.) ‘‘When you worked at DuPont in this town,’’ Darlene says today, ‘‘you could have everything you wanted.’’ DuPont paid for his education, it secured him a mortgage and it paid him a generous salary. DuPont even gave him a free supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used as soap in the family’s dishwasher and to clean the car. Sometimes her husband came home from work sick — fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting — after working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. Darlene says the men at the plant called it ‘‘Teflon flu.’’In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. Darlene would remember this six years later when, at 36, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy and again eight years later, when she had a second surgery. When the strange letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, ‘‘I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. I asked myself, what does DuPont have to do with our drinking water?’’

Joe called the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (‘‘They treated me like I had the plague’’), the Parkersburg office of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (‘‘nothing to worry about’’), the water division (‘‘I got shut down’’), the local health department (‘‘just plain rude’’), even DuPont (‘‘I was fed the biggest line of [expletive] anybody could have been fed’’), before a scientist in the regional E.P.A. office finally took his call.‘‘Good God, Joe,’’ the scientist said. ‘‘What the hell is that stuff doing in your water?’’ He sent Kiger information about the Tennant lawsuit. On the court papers Kiger kept seeing the same name: Robert Bilott, of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, in Cincinnati.Bilott had anticipated suing on behalf of the one or two water districts closest to Washington Works. But tests revealed that six districts, as well as dozens of private wells, were tainted with levels of PFOA higher than DuPont’s own internal safety standard. In Little Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.But Bilott faced a vexing legal problem. PFOA was not a regulated substance. It appeared on no federal or state list of contaminants. How could Bilott claim that 70,000 people had been poisoned if the government didn’t recognize PFOA as a toxin — if PFOA, legally speaking, was no different than water itself? In 2001, it could not even be proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking water caused health problems. There was scant information available about its impact on large populations. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown?The best metric Bilott had to judge a safe exposure level was DuPont’s own internal limit of one part per billion. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, it announced that it would re-evaluate that figure. As in the Tennant case, DuPont formed a team composed of its own scientists and scientists from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. It announced a new threshold: 150 parts per billion.Bilott found the figure ‘‘mind-blowing.’’ The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Within two years, three lawyers regularly used by DuPont were hired by the state D.E.P. in leadership positions. One of them was placed in charge of the entire agency. ‘‘The way that transpired was just amazing to me,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘I suppose it wasn’t so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the system there. But it was to me.’’ The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had become the government regulators responsible for enforcing that limit.Bilott devised a new legal strategy. A year earlier, West Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. A plaintiff needs to prove only that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. In these cases, should a plaintiff later become ill, he or she can sue retroactively for damages. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action suit in August 2001 in state court, even though four of the six affected water districts lay across the Ohio border.Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilott’s research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public — anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. The E.P.A. was particularly alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American blood banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. By 2003 the average concentration of PFOA in the blood of an adult American was four to five parts per billion. In 2000, 3M ceased production of PFOA. DuPont, rather than use an alternative compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, N.C., to manufacture the substance for its own use.Bilott’s strategy appeared to have worked. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. It agreed to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts if they wanted them and pay a cash award of $70 million. It would fund a scientific study to determine whether there was a ‘‘probable link’’ — a term that delicately avoided any declaration of causation — between PFOA and any diseases. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont.

The chemical site near Parkersburg, W.Va., source of the waste at the center of the DuPont class-action lawsuit.A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would move on. ‘‘In any other class action you’ve ever read about,’’ Deitzler says, ‘‘you get your 10 bucks in the mail, the lawyers get paid and the lawsuit goes away. That’s what we were supposed to do.’’ For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his firm a fortune. But now Taft received a windfall: Bilott and his team of West Virginian plaintiff lawyers received $21.7 million in fees from the settlement. ‘‘I think they were thinking, This guy did O.K.,’’ Deitzler says. ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a raise.’’Not only had Taft recouped its losses, but DuPont was providing clean water to the communities named in the suit. Bilott had every reason to walk away.He didn’t.‘‘There was a gap in the data,’’ Bilott says. The company’s internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to factory employees. DuPont could argue — and had argued — that even if PFOA caused medical problems, it was only because factory workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong.Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? ‘‘Class members were concerned about three things,’’ Winter says. ‘‘One: Do I have C8 in my blood? Two: If I do, is it harmful? Three: If it’s harmful, what are the effects?’’ Bilott and his colleagues realized they could answer all three questions, if only they could test their clients. Now, they realized, there was a way to do so. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 check.The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire population’s personal data and infinite resources available to study them. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested.It was assured that the panel would return convincing results. But Bilott could not predict what those results would be. If no correlation was found between PFOA and illness, Bilott’s clients would be barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. Because of the sheer quantity of data provided by the community health study and the unlimited budget — it ultimately cost DuPont $33 million — the panel took longer than expected to perform its analysis. Two years passed without any findings. Bilott waited. A third year passed. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Still the panel was quiet. Bilott waited.It was not a peaceful wait. The pressure on Bilott at Taft had built since he initiated the class-action suit in 2001. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the firm’s money and was unable to attract new clients, he found himself in an awkward position.‘‘This case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘regardless of how hugely successful it ends up, will never in the Taft firm’s mind replace what they’ve lost in the way of legal business over the years.’’The longer it took for the science panel to conduct its research, the more expensive the case became. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled frequently to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories about PFOA. ‘‘We were incurring a lot of expenses,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, we’d have to eat it all.’’

Land where Tennant cattle once grazed. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesClients called Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. When would they get relief? Among those who called was Jim Tennant. Wilbur, who had cancer, had died of a heart attack. Two years later, Wilbur’s wife died of cancer. Bilott was tormented by ‘‘the thought that we still hadn’t been able to hold this company responsible for what they did in time for those people to see it.’’Taft did not waver in its support of the case, but the strain began to show. ‘‘It was stressful,’’ Sarah Barlage, Bilott’s wife, says. ‘‘He was exasperated that it was lasting a long time. But his heels were so dug in. He’s extremely stubborn. Every day that went by with no movement gave him more drive to see it through. But in the back of our minds, we knew that there are cases that go on forever.’’His colleagues on the case detected a change in Bilott. ‘‘I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him,’’ Winter says. ‘‘Rob had a young family, kids growing up, and he was under pressure from his firm. Rob is a private person. He didn’t complain. But he showed signs of being under enormous stress.’’In 2010, Bilott began suffering strange attacks: His vision would blur, he couldn’t put on his socks, his arms felt numb. His doctors didn’t know what was happening. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. They struck suddenly, without warning, and their effects lasted days. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. ‘‘Nothing different than normal,’’ Bilott told them. ‘‘Nothing it hadn’t been for years.’’The doctors ultimately hit upon an effective medication. The episodes ceased and their symptoms, apart from an occasional tic, are under control, but he still doesn’t have a diagnosis.‘‘It was stressful,’’ Bilott says, ‘‘not to know what the heck was going on.’’In December 2011, after seven years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a ‘‘probable link’’ between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.‘‘There was relief,’’ Bilott says, understated nearly to the point of self-effacement. ‘‘We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. Especially since, for all those years, DuPont had been saying that we were lying, trying to scare and mislead people. Now we had a scientific answer.’’As of October, 3,535 plaintiffs have filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. The first member of this group to go to trial was a kidney-cancer survivor named Carla Bartlett. In October, Bartlett was awarded $1.6 million. DuPont plans to appeal. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartlett’s case: Hers is one of five ‘‘bellwether’’ cases that will be tried over the course of this year. After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. Or DuPont can fight each suit individually, a tactic that tobacco companies have used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890.DuPont’s continuing refusal to accept responsibility is maddening to Bilott. ‘‘To think that you’ve negotiated in good faith a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a point where certain things were to be resolved but then remain contested,’’ he says. ‘‘I think about the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or have died while waiting. It’s infuriating.’’In total, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.As part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased production and use of PFOA in 2013. The five other companies in the world that produce PFOA are also phasing out production. DuPont, which is currently negotiating a merger with Dow Chemical, last year severed its chemical businesses: They have been spun off into a new corporation called Chemours. The new company has replaced PFOA with similar fluorine-based compounds designed to biodegrade more quickly — the alternative considered and then discarded by DuPont more than 20 years ago. Like PFOA, these new substances have not come under any regulation from the E.P.A. When asked about the safety of the new chemicals, Chemours replied in a statement: ‘‘A significant body of data demonstrates that these alternative chemistries can be used safely.’’Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that have replaced PFOA. PFOA and its replacements are suspected to belong to a large class of artificial compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals; these compounds, which include chemicals used in the production of pesticides, plastics and gasoline, interfere with human reproduction and metabolism and cause cancer, thyroid problems and nervous-system disorders. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology research has found that even extremely low doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. Among the Madrid scientists’ recommendations: ‘‘Enact legislation to require only essential uses of PFASs’’ and ‘‘Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick.’’When asked about the Madrid Statement, Dan Turner, DuPont’s head of global media relations, wrote in an email: ‘‘DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to introduce its alternatives. Extensive data has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and have improved health safety profiles. We are confident that these alternative chemistries can be used safely — they are well characterized, and the data has been used to register them with environmental agencies around the world.’’Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the West Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ‘‘provisional’’ limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. In response to Bilott’s most recent letter, the E.P.A. claimed that it would announce a ‘‘lifetime health advisory level for PFOA’’ by ‘‘early 2016.’’This advisory level, if indeed announced, might be a source of comfort to future generations. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents’ blood, your children’s blood, your lover’s blood. How did it get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have drunk tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott’s class-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Most residents appear not to know this.Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.‘‘We see a situation,’’ Joe Kiger says, ‘‘that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now it’s everywhere, it’s global. We’ve taken the cap off something here. But it’s just not DuPont. Good God. There are 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there right now. We have no idea what we’re taking.’’Bilott doesn’t regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. But he is still angry. ‘‘The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long,’’ Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, ‘‘that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing. That’s 14 years of this stuff continuing to be used, continuing to be in the drinking water all over the country. DuPont just quietly switches over to the next substance. And in the meantime, they fight everyone who has been injured by it.’’Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When it concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.A correction was made on Jan. 24, 2016:An article on Jan 10. about legal action against DuPont for chemical pollution referred incorrectly to DuPont’s response in the 1970s when the company discovered high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of workers at Washington Works, a DuPont factory. DuPont withheld the information from the E.P.A., not from its workers. The article also misstated the year DuPont agreed to a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A. It was 2005, not 2006. In addition, the article misidentified the water district where a resident received a letter from the district noting that PFOA had been detected in the drinking water. It was Lubeck, W.Va. — not Little Hocking, Ohio. The article also misidentified the district where water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. It was Little Hocking, not Lubeck. And the article misidentified the city in Washington State that has fluorochemicals in its drink-ing water. It is Issaquah, not Seattle._________Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow.’’ He lives in New Orleans and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

我完全没想到还原度能有这么高，看完电影把NYT上的那篇长文从头到尾读了一遍，发现电影真的几乎没有夸张，连压力大视线模糊一侧身体动不了这种我以为编出来的细节都是真的。

借此记录一些看电影和文章的想法。

关于Rob和TaftRob期间有两次机会可以全身而退。

一次是2000年，Tennant与DuPont和解，律所可以拿到contingency fee而结束这一官司。

另一次是2004年DuPont决定在集体诉讼中选择和解，Rob给律所带来21.7M的回报，可以算是大功告成。

但两次他都没有选择停下，而且自此再未代表企业打过官司。

对于做这些的原因，文章里几次引用他的话都是“It's the right thing to do.” 这个世界上还是在有人坚持着自己内心的对与错的。

另外，我觉得Taft这家律所也挺了不起，其中不乏一些道德感较强的律师。

虽然Rob受到很大压力，但律所一方面在前期允许了对DuPont的上诉，要知道这肯定会给专为化学公司辩护的律所带来不小麻烦，而且后期在战线拉长时也依然继续支持并付着不菲的费用。

我觉得这已经很难得了。

跑个题，影片中居然让黑人演员当了个拜金的bad ass也是没想到哈哈。

关于污染与监管NYT文章中提到，1976年的时候3M和DuPont就知道了PFOA不仅只通过饮用污水威胁人身体，而是对所有公众的健康都会构成威胁，而EPA是什么时候分析并得出这一结论的呢？

2002年。

由于政府监管跟不上公司的研发创新，现在仍有超过6万种化学材料不在监管之下，我们对自己正暴露在什么之下毫无概念。

电影里Anne Hathaway在医院里问医生有没有可能她丈夫是被人下毒和前面其不相信丈夫认为DuPont在威胁公众健康的结论，两相比较，让人更觉无奈。

另外，文章中提到，2000年3M停止了生产PFOA，结果DuPont索性自己建厂生产，直到2013年才停止生产和使用PFOA，企业牟利之心和政府监管之不力让人无语。

9.5纪实类或者基于现实改编的电影，尤其永恒的意义，尤其是敢于揭露社会阴暗面的作品，以前的确是了解特利福或者氟利昂这些东西是有害的，但这是我第1次真正实质意义上指导事件的大致始末，只能说是非常感慨，致敬这些敲钟人。

各位演员的演技都是在线的，印象最深刻的是 Tim在那一场律所讨论会上突然的情绪爆发，实际上让我感觉真的是宝刀未老，马克叔的演技也非常在线，安妮海瑟薇在这一次的表现，也可以说是不赖。

关于这一事件，其他的影评人们也已经讲述过了，我便不再复述，但是仍然希望大家可以去了解这一事件。

西弗吉尼亚的人均收入在美国50个州中排名倒数第一。

多年前的一次旅行中，当地人的自嘲能力给我留下深刻印象。

一家乡村餐馆的老板问我，知道西弗吉尼亚最有名的笑话吗？

我摇头。

他说，“牙刷toothbrush是西弗吉尼亚发明的。

”我不明就里，没笑出来。

他接着说，“如果是其他地方人发明的，牙刷就不会叫toothbrush，应该叫teethbrush。

”这是我听到过的美国各州中的最佳自嘲。

西弗吉尼亚居民牙齿脱落的比例稍高，所以才拿单数和复数开玩笑，因为经济相对落后，也因为冰毒、阿片的泛滥。

不过，将西弗吉尼亚仅视作穷乡僻壤只能失之于简单粗暴。

民谣歌手约翰·丹佛著名的《乡间路带我回家》描述的正是西弗吉尼亚的美好，很多地方看着离天堂很近，就跟歌里唱的一样。

这首歌也出现在电影《黑水》(Dark Waters, 2019)的音轨上。

主角Rob Bilott在西弗吉尼亚乡村长大，成年后向西跨过俄亥俄河，到大城市辛辛那提做律师。

Rob与根的联系无法割断，乡亲们的不幸遭遇让他首先成为吹哨人，接着成为不懈抗争20多年的维权律师，以个人力量对抗美国社会的超级强权、化工巨头杜邦公司。

起因在于曾被誉为划时代化工产品的特氟隆，即不粘锅涂层的重要成分，其中的化学物质PFOA有可能造成溃疡、肿瘤、新生儿的眼睛错位。

杜邦公司经由化工造福人类的同时，他们仍然具有利益集团隐匿罪责的本性。

Rob完成使命过程中需要面对重重困难，而且他并不能够进入为民请命的圣徒心态。

杜邦公司是当地最重要的经济支柱，因为Rob，很多人或许将饭碗不保。

他回到乡间无法找到荣归故里的幻觉，反倒需要为人身安全担忧。

当然比起中国来，Rob在维权过程中还算幸运，因为国家机器并不全受利益集团支配。

杜邦等企业一直是律师楼的主要客户，明知道Rob的做法接近吃肉砸锅，良心驱使之下，老板仍然基本支持。

太太在几乎每一个场景中都唠唠叨叨，但刀子嘴、豆腐心，立场大致为夫唱妇随。

安妮·海瑟薇扮演妻子的角色，她保持着自己固有的特点。

好演员演谁像谁，而海瑟薇演谁都像海瑟薇。

首先要告诉大家事实，然后再给大家做选择.这是一个zf、企业、科学家要做的事情。

科学带来便利、快捷这是毋庸置疑的，但同时带来的副作用也是数不胜数，至今还有6万多种的化学成分是还没有对人体是否有危害的检测报告。

一个物种最终走向自我灭亡，都是从内部的溃烂，而消失。

所以请人类慢一点，科技慢一点，发布慢一点，赚钱慢一点，再慢一点。

也许生命延续也会慢一点。

整个体制都被操控了，他们想让我们认为体制会保护我们，但那是个谎言，是我们自己保护自己。

——《黑水》01《黑水》是由Participant Media公司出品，改编自罗伯特·比洛特律师揭露美国杜邦公司长达几十年的化学污染骗局的真实事件。

值得一提的是《美国工厂》、《聚焦》等社会事件改编的电影均是出自这一公司之手。

影片极高程度地还原了事件，使得其现实意义远大于电影艺术本身。

1938年，世界500强的杜邦公司意外发明了聚四氟乙烯（PTFE），中文名称特氟龙。

因其超级稳定的化学性质，被冠以“塑料之王”的称号，广泛应用于原子能、国防、航天、电子建筑等领域。

1954年，杜邦集团开始用特氟龙制造不粘锅，一时间成为其最赚钱的项目。

真正有毒的物质并不是特氟龙而是PFOA（全氟辛酸铵），它一种制作特氟龙聚合反应过程中添加的助剂，而并非合成特氟龙的原料。

02全片大部分的画面使用冷峻的蓝色调，采用大量的主观镜头停留于报纸、书页、照片、去体现罗伯特调查取证收集线索的复杂和艰难。

影片跨度十余年，气氛沉重，压迫感极强，大量的调查数字令人触目惊心。

抛开电影类型的固有分类，那这就是一部社会恐怖片。

罗伯特为了这次漫长的起诉浪费了自己20年的光阴，损害了健康，远离了家人，甚至遭到民众的攻击。

科学调查组对污染物标准模糊不定，政府通过各方面压力试图让罗伯特放弃起诉，杜邦公司更是公然撕毁条约竟无人问责。

最终杜邦公司交出的罚款和赔偿甚至远不及其一年的利润。

如今它仍是世界五百强企业，似乎这件事对它没有任何影响。

影片最后观众甚至不会感到正义获得胜利喜悦，更多的是和罗伯特一样五味杂陈的无奈与酸楚。

政府需要大公司的经济效益，民众需要政府保护权益。

该怎么选？

亦或有了答案。

03电影是人类社会最伟大的记录者和见证者，看到《黑水》《聚焦》后，不禁为这些依旧重视电影记录意义的人喝彩。

个人对抗体制的现实电影，在韩国和美国很常见，然而这样的影片在国内却少之又少。

本以为《我不是药神》会是一个开端，但现在看来大概也是结尾。

当然过分苛责中国电影人并不会对中国电影有推动作用。

审查机制如何改革，电影分级何时推行，这也许才能真正改变现状。

即使带着镣铐跳舞，也希望中国电影人能舞得漂亮。

04近年来，我国兴建了多个大型氟化工基地，世界各大氟化工巨头也纷纷在华兴建含氟聚合物生产设施。

氟化工产业快速发展导致了中国前几年PFOA/PFO的大量应用和排放。

研究表明，中国每年PFOA/PFO的环境排放量从2004年的近20吨/年增至2012年的逾50吨/年，超过欧美等氟化工发达国家排放量的总和。

按照当前世界各国氟化工生产状况和污染治理措施推算，预计全世界2005年～2050年间PFOA/PFO的总排放可能在475吨～950吨水平，其中大部分将来自中国。

中国暂无专门针对PFOA/PFO环境风险的管控政策。

过去十年，欧洲和美洲逐步淘汰PFOA，国际公约《斯德哥尔摩公约》也逐步将C8类污染物（包括PFOA和PFOS）拉入黑名单。

中国虽然也是公约缔约国之一，不过作为一个化工大国，早就已经接棒成为生产的第一大国了。

在中国，多个地方的河流土壤、食品及人体内，都检测出明显超标的C8含量。

不过公众知之甚少，国家层面也没有环境质量标准、排放标准及检测技术规范，甚至还没有进行环境监测。

既然生活在国家的体制内，我们没有理由攻击或歧视它，但亡羊补牢为时不晚。

第一步也许是应该揭开问题的盖子。

这些事实，望周知。

“立体的人物塑造“众所周知，美国是一个非常推崇个人主义，英雄主义的国家。

这一特点在《黑水》中体现地淋漓尽致。

主人公Rob义无反顾地帮助无辜大众，不顾自己的律所的地位，不顾家庭的经济压力，不顾家人的误解，不顾旁观者的白眼。

乍一看，他不过是脸谱化的正义使者，鸡汤文中的赞美对象。

但，真的仅仅是这样吗？

托德·海因斯告诉你，nonono，别把事情简单化。

首先，Rob是完全出于自己的正义感而帮助那些弱势民众吗？

影片通过安妮·海瑟薇之口告诉我们；Rob是一个没有童年的可怜孩子。

多次搬家，没有朋友，没有联系，他的童年记忆里承载的只有他的家人，他的友邻。

所以，他才不愿意辜负祖母的期望，不愿意辜负曾经邻居大叔的期望，作为一个有能力的环境律师，助他们一臂之力。

既是出于公德，也是出于私义。

其次，作为一个丈夫，Rob并不完美。

关于案情，他对妻子三缄其口；对于家庭，他并不上心。

很难想象，作为律师，本应是滔滔不绝，口若悬河的形象，而他在面对家人的时候却甚至很难说出一句完整的话。

再次，Rob还是一个虔诚的天主教徒。

人们通常认为天主教徒是保守死板的，在堕胎持枪等问题上愚昧不堪。

但一枚硬币是有两面的。

正是由于他们的虔诚，所以他们的道德感比一般人更强，由此也可以解释Rob的行为动机。

“正义的代价“本片最核心的戏剧冲突就在于主角Rob面临的种种压力，其中来自杜邦的压力和家庭的压力都属于显性压力，最引人深思的压力来自于大众的压力。

被Rob帮助的大众不停地催促他，责难他；与事件无关的群众只是把他当作摇钱树，甚至为杜邦辩护，认为杜邦是清白的。

在这种种压力之下，Rob终于顶不住了。

他的手总是止不住地颤抖，他开始出现幻觉，怀疑杜邦的人要来害他，甚至插入车钥匙，发动汽车都要耗上巨大的勇气。

但面对这些，他还是选择不告诉身边的亲友，所以我说，这是一个纠结的英雄，默默坚持自己认为对的事。

话说回来，尽管本片的结局是he，但我还是对“正义会迟到，但从不缺席”这句话持怀疑态度。

因为这其中存在巨大的变数，what if Rob没有等到胜利到来的那一天就挂了，what if杜邦没有把完整的资料交给Rob。

即使是片中那样的he，我们也很难说实现了完全的公平。

对一个产业巨头来说，这些补偿或许会大伤元气，但不至倒闭。

更何况时代会忘记，人们会忘记，倒下一个巨头，还有另一个巨头，因为资本但逻辑没有改变。

我们唯一能做的，就是祈祷“正义的使者”能够及时出现，国家的监管能够有效执行。

我想，这就是本片打动人的一个关键点所在，尽管我们对英雄主义有些抗拒，有些怀疑，但在内心深处，我们都渴望这样的“正义使者”来拯救我们充满谎言的世界。

全氟辛烷羧酸（perfluorooctanoic acid， PFOA）及其盐类（perfluorooctanoate， PFO），是氟化工领域广泛使用的含氟聚合物合成及加工助剂，也是织物含氟防水/防油/防污整理剂及其消费品中的主要杂质。

PFOA/PFO具有持久性和难降解性，能够在人体和生物体内积累，并对人体和其他生物的代谢、生殖和内分泌系统造成干扰。

世界卫生组织国际癌症研究所于2014年6月发布的《关于人类致癌风险的专题报告》将PFOA/PFO划分为2B类（人类可疑致癌物）。

PFOA(C8)可以用来生产特氟龙，不是C8=特氟龙，但消费者无法准确辨别购买的锅具所使用的特氟龙生产过程中是否使用了PFOA。

我查询自家使用的苏泊尔IH电饭煲的材料说明时，未见到PFOA豁免的告知。

但科学而言，特氟龙耐热260度，仅作为电饭煲使用是没有安全隐患的。

但需要注意的是， 中国环境报在2015年7月的报道《PFOA/PFO环境风险管控需加快进程》中指出：目前中国已经成为国际较大的PFOA/PFO生产、使用和排放国，对其环境防控必须进一步重视。

这就很有意思了。